Texture Database

Drexel Vision Group

About the Database

The Drexel Texture Database contains 20 different textures, each of which is imaged approximately 2,000 times under different (known) illumination directions, at multiple distances, and with different in-plane and out-of-plane rotations.

This database was originally released in conjunction with the following paper. Please cite this work when using our database:

Note that this database is provided for your benefit without warranty or guarantees of any sort.
If you note any problem with the database, please email us, but please note that we may not have the resources to deal with all issues.

Database Preview

The table below shows each of the different distances and viewing directions for each of the textures.
Clicking on an entry in the table will show the sequence of appearances under the various lighting directions as an animated gif.
Note that each gif is a compressed version of the actual data and should not be used as an input to any scientific algorithm. It is provided for visualization purposes only.

Technical Detail

These photographs were taken in a darkroom under a point light source. A reflective sphere was used to determine the lighting direction, and a white piece of paper was used to measure any variation in the apparent illumination intensity. The raw image data from a single image have been converted into EXR format (multiple exposures were not used to generate each image). The image order, light source directions, and estimated intensities are included in a text file for each set.

The database contains 20 directories, one for each texture. Each sub-directory is given a name as follows:

Example lights.png image

DX_INYY_OUTZZ

X is the distance (1, 2, or 3)

YY is the approximate in-plane rotation in degrees

ZZ is the approximate out-of-plane rotation in degrees

In each of these sub-directories there are the following files:

light.txt - A list of lighting directions, and intensities.

Each row has the form: IMAGE_PREFIX L_X L_Y L_Z L_R L_G L_B

IMAGE_PREFIX - the image filename excluding the extension.

L_X L_Y L_Z - the X, Y and Z components of the lighting direction.

L_R L_G L_B - the RGB intensity values for the light. The included README has more detail on this.

Lines starting with a semicolon should be ignored (the image has likely been removed as well). These images were faulty, or corrupted.

lights.png - A visual description of the lighting directions, for debugging. An example appears to the right

_____.exr - A series of OpenEXR formatted images. Each of these images will have an associated line in light.txt giving its illumination direction and intensity.